Anathem: Light Reading (Not)

Given the relative funk I’ve been in with respect to blogging, I’ve been trying to expose my mind to some different information. Stuff that’s a bit out of my ordinary. Books are rare for me.

Thanks to some amazon.com gift certificates, I found myself with a relatively cheap way to obtain Neal Stephenson‘s latest novel, Anathem. At this writing, I am close to the half-way mark, at the start of Part 7. Not bad for only having had the book less than 36 hours. I’ve had plenty of opportunity to read.

The book is about a different world–not unlike ours–but with a much different history. And a much different vocabulary. For example, the word plane is not short for airplane, but it means to “utterly destroy a person’s position in the course of Dialog.” Math isn’t short for mathematics, but rather “a relatively small community of avout.” A Jeejah is what we’d call a smartphone, i.e. a mobile phone with camera, web browser, media player, and so on.

Because of the remarkable difference in vocabulary, it has been a bit of work to keep certain aspects of what is going on straight. However, that’s a good thing. It’s making that brain work.